The Darkening of Mirkwood sets out to complete the mandate Cubicle 7 gave itself in the original Core-rule book for The One Ring, telling the story of the Darkening of Mirkwood, the 30 year time of troubles from the expulsion of the Necromancer from Dol Goldur by the White Council to the Death of King Bard. The Darkening of Mirkwood completes the goal given in the Fellowship Phase and the end product exceeds it overall but not without some hitches.

First and foremost Cubicle 7 must be commended for their commitment to both Tolkien's world, its lore, and their attempt to make their own stories within it and facilitate the same for the rest of us. The atmospherics of the book its prose, wordsmithing and voice are phenomenal especially in the early sections beautifully titled "The Last Good Years". The authors did an excellent job of casting a pall of foreboding doom over the adventures within the text, something that you can always feel at your back, leering over you but never, ever see when you look behind. The Mirkwood campaign says right from the start your quest is doomed but the fate of your characters over this 30 year period and those of the people they love is mutable. You are given the prospect of Hope in the authentic Tolkien context, and you may yet steel or preserve a place of light in the Great Forest where the Enemy does not hold sway.

It is here that I come to the campaign book's most defining and excellent feature, the integration of player characters their personalities, backstories, and expanded selves into the campaign's events. Dozens of sidebars and parenthetical texts are devoted to giving you the option to put one of your Fellowship's characters in a prominent place in the campaign, usually for the native Woodmen culture but also for Elves and Beornings and some for the Dwarves and Men of Lake-Town, Dale and Erebor. There's no planet of the hats here either, the divisions in these cultures and realms, already present with the Enemy defeated and potentially stoked by his agents for the benefit of Evil, are expertly written into the game's narrative, allowing the opportunity for your own breaking of your fellowship as the goals of each faction change and diverge with the Darkening of Greenwood the Great. Glimpses of characters and events from Heart of the Wild and Adventures in the Wilderland also help to provide a sense of continuity, that these events do not exist in a vacuum. The actions your characters took during these adventures provide unique rewards especially for those who are looking for some version of a happy ending to this story.

Since it's a 30-year campaign, the development of relationships, specifically familial ones, is encouraged and while we all know these lands are fated to fall into Darkness, your characters do not and especially in the early years, building something new, something better now that Darkness has obstensibly retreated, seems like an excellent idea. Build a bigger settlement next to Dol Goldur, let the wayward kin of the Woodsmen join the Folk-Moot, and everyone is getting married, shacking up and getting busy, and your characters are encouraged to do the same. This adds an element of dramatic potency to this game that is explicitly outlined in the introductory pages and advocated throughout the campaign: that of passing the torch to the next generation, of reluctantly or enthusiastically letting your successors take up your burdens in the fight against evil. This concept of "Heroic Heritage" is actually even codified into a game mechanic and other opportunities to add some family history that is relevant to your quest are added as well.

You are given the broad opportunities to reshape Mirkwood and forge its destiny in the face of ther return of the Enemy, giving the Mirkwood Campaign a strategic or city/colony building element rarely seen in tabletop rpgs. You can devote resources to restoring the Dwarven Road, building those new settlements I mentioned, reclaiming various old haunts of evil and in keeping with the campaign's narrative, some of these choices become more desparate and reckless as darkness starts to close in again. While in the begining restoring that Dwarven Road seems like an easy and obvious choice with wide support from personalities and characters within the campaign setting, the decision to retake the Grey Delve, the old Dwarven holdfast in the Mountains north of Mirkwood, seems like a risky prospect at best. The leaders of the different realms are now indifferent after 20-odd years of struggle against the returned Enemy and while giving the Dwarves another mountain seems like a good idea, the Campaign makes this out to be both a monumental task given the sparse resources you yourself will have to gather and not necessarily a worthwhile one once you've got your expedition assembled.

Once again, in this way, the reputation, standing and legacy of different characters interacts heavily with the course of the Campaign and in the end it really does make it or break it. Your efforts and accomplishments really do have consequences and Cubicle 7 did not leave it in the hands and heads of the players to invent them. How expertly they did this really goes to show how much they know their customers in the Tolkien Fandom or at least the world they love, or probably both.

As you might by now understand I'm a sucker for atmospherics and the Darkening of Mirkwood delivers this in spades especially in the early chapters. In the middle though, it starts to get a little lazy and several choices or narrative paths are just hand waived away while others are given beautifully thoughtful resolutions that depend entirely on which of the many permutations of endings you've decided upon. They start skipping years, like amateur fiction writers that started out with an idea but never really carefully plotted it out and realized they might have set their goals a little too high. This is the campaign's only failing. While marketed as an "Epic 30 Year Campaign" it falls just a little short of that goal. While chock-full of moments both grand and subtle, beautiful and dark, Cubicle 7 starts to rely on the quality of their prose by the last days of the campaign rather than adding more content and the book is a bit shorter than one might imagine. Now some people might say "great! no filler!" but none of the missions contained within this book could ever be considered anything of the kind. Generic and banal are not words ascribed to the Mirkwood Campaign and is not something it aspires to even when it attempts a rare moment of levity (to their credit Cubicle 7 leaves the tone of the campaign entirely in the hands of the players) to break the weight of despair that might overcome player and character alike.

The Darkening of Mirkwood campaign is a superb addition to what is already widely considered the most faithful adaptation of Tolkien's Legendarium for tabletop roleplaying and you can tell it was written by a bunch of Tolkienites with the hearts of fangirls, the minds of scholars and deft hands of weavers who spin stories that border on literature in the quality, authenticity and atmospheric synthaesia of the final product.

I feel kinda bad about giving Vampire: The Requiem such a bad review but honestly the quality of the book is not at all what I would expect from an organization as storied and acclaimed as White Wolf/Onyx Path. Especially compared against the beautiful V20 core-rulebook people insisted I check out to redeem my opinion of Chronicles/World of Darkness, VtR's 2nd Edition core rulebook is.... I don't wish to use expletives but it is just subpar. The quality of the prose is about what I would write in my teens on my PBEM groups, jumpy and scattered in an attempt to build mystery and flair but failing, terribly. I mean god-bless them for trying and I'm not necessarily saying I could do better I'm just saying I expected a little better from a company and its flagship game that places such a premium on atmosphere which is what finally made me bite the bullet and buy this to begin with. The book fails to deliver on the very well-written atmospheric section in the introduction and the artwork cements its sort of cartoon-y place in my mind. I mean honestly why haven't companies just sourced art from Deviant-Art? My elder friends on the interwebs remember Vampire: The Masquerade's heyday and I'm familiar with it by their proxy and the second edition to the follow-up Vampire: The Requiem doesn't even come close to their description.

The Vampire Clans (god I hope I'm using that right...) or the bloodlines (incase I'm not) do not compare favorably to the ones my friends described and looking at the V20 rulebook I see very large differences that go beyond the simplification I was forewarned of. While the thinning of the herd of bloodlines from fourteen to five is a good change I think, the descriptions of these bloodlines, while claiming to be "archetypal", are about as nuanced as a buzzfeed description of the houses of Hogwarts. Sure, expanding, adapting and modifying rulebook characterizations is our job but the book itself doesn't seem to encourage it.

The organizations are a completely different matter. With the exception of the Carthian Movement, all feel incredibly vibrant and cool organizations though the way they are integrated in to the different cities and character profiles in the following sections leave a "meh" quality to them. The Ordo Dracul especially is a prettty complex and multi-dimensional assortment that was a pleasant shock from the very flat and colorless descriptors I had spent the previous 40 pages on.

The following sections describing the eponymous Requiem Vampires participate in during the World of Darkness. While it mostly describes game mechanics and in this regard is incredibly interesting and provocative in the White Wolf Storytelling system way, when it tries to go deeper into the core concepts of "Requiem", "Masquerade", and wider Vampire society the low caliber of the book's prose rears its ugly head again. The concepts of "anchors", "vitae", "the beast", recieve pitiable elucidations and is one of the few times I can remember reading lore, thinking of a question, seeing the answer in the next few paragraphs and being dissapointed with my attempt at edification.

When we finally arrive at the VtR's additions and contributions to the Storytelling system I was really prepared to say "nope I'm good" since I knew this would mean putting all of those rules and mechanics into a narrative and while this 20 page seventh section of the book is short in length it does not spare the reader from the shoddy prose and ocular muscle strain incurred by the rolling of one's eyebrows as the writers try to sell you on this world. Now that's not exactly gracious of me and I'm not a cynical person, I can see beauty in kitsch-y things but that's because they usually have other redeeming qualities or some other value and Vampire: the Requiem doesn't provide either to me and left me with a very bad taste in my mouth and an odd feeling in my head when I finished reading.

I realize of course that my 2-Star review is a minority and a lot of people obviously love this book but as someone who just picked it up as their first intoduction to the WoD I was profoundly disapointed. Now as I said that's not a write-off of all the hype we've heard about White Wolf and Onyx Path, I've seen at least one astounding example of their work that jusitifes the phenomena their games have been elevated to, but VtR 2nd edition is not one of them.